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A Real Bill Gates Rant
lou ibmix XI submitted an
email written by Bill Gates a few years ago and turned over to the feds as part of the government's antitrust case. Great quotes like 'Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?' and 'The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind.' We like to think of him as an abstract, but I think this is interesting stuff. Also, this might seem familiar. Oops.
I don't understand all the hate for Bill. Unless if this e-mail was nothing more than a publicity stunt to make him look less evil, it shows that he wasn't happy with the way things were going. He clearly saw the direction the ship was going and he couldn't turn it in time.
Despite what you say about Microsoft now, Ballmer will always be funny to read about and watch on youtube.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
We like to think of him as an abstract? Huh?
It's been 6 years, and he still can't install it? Maybe he should install Wubi, and try apt-get, that usually works.
"'This is a shocking e-mail. Shocking!' And I said, 'What do you think I do all day? Sending an e-mail like that, that is my job. That's what it's all about. We're here to make things better.""
Apparently he either really sucked at his job, or it was the job of the people who worked for him to completely ignore what he said.
Maybe had Bill been more hands-on in a Steve Jobs sort of way, the focus might have been more on usability and less on feature-lists. Bill gets what he gets. It's his fault that usability sucks, because he didn't cut into the bottom-line to make it better. It's also Bill's "fault" that Windows enjoyed a 95% market share for a decade.
Now let's turn the conversation the other way...to KDE and GNOME. Bill Gates here, is just being a typical newbie if he is anyway. No offence to him here. But if he were to send such a "rant" to the GNOME folks, you all know what kind of answers he'd get.
This is not to say the KDE folks get it either. But for Linux to succeed even in the minutest way, it must meet Joe Public's expectations...and this can be done while at the same time meeting expectations of whoever it is at present.
I guess I will be labelled a troll but what I am saying is the truth...so go right ahead and mod me down.
how many test pages do you print?
Problems opening the control panel can often be due to poorly written 3rd party control panel applets (.cpl files). My control panel would frequently lock up or open very slowly....
Well that sounds like a very poor design decision, synchronously calling into 3rd party code to see if it's okay to remove such code. IMHO an uninstaller should have more confidence and authority. What's the point of an uninstaller that is subordinate to its minions?
If you are talking about the time taken to list installed programs, this was sped up considerably with Vista, which begins to show installed programs instantly...
No thanks, I tried Vista for an hour and then returned the laptop. Plus this is a pointless hack. I do not care if the items start showing up as they're found. I need to see all of them.
...and populates the list in a fraction of the time XP uses for the same task.
A fraction of two hours is still too long to wait for something that should be instantaneous.
This seems more like "Classic Troll" to me. Are you sure you aren't ripping the programs out manually in a fit of rage and then surprised to find that Windows can't find the uninstaller?
I sometimes rip the program out by hand as the stupid add/remove gadget is not featureful enough to inform me as to what it's talking about or when or where it installed FooMangler Deluxe, plus it gives me no useful undo/redo ability with these critical system components.
Entires can be removed by deleting the appropriate registry keys located in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
Oh yeah, good strategy, point me to yet another clueless system utility, where any change is likely to break the whole system, and with no undo ability.
I know it's a dupe, but I still love to see Gates say: "But that is just the start of the crap..."
It says it all right there. At least Microsoft knows about the problems with Windows. It is said that realizing there is an issue is the first step to resolving it :)
I don't think Bill Gates is really responsible for the problems with Windows. In fact, I think it's probably one reason why he left when he did. The company just got too big for him to manage day-to-day - he wasn't the one making relatively minor decisions like where Windows Movie Maker sits on the Microsoft web site or how to install it, somebody else was making those decisions. And little decisions like that, all added up together, are 95% of what makes Windows as maddening to use as it is. And he was as annoyed by that stuff as everybody else.
Worse for him, it was his job to defend it, which probably gave him never-ending heartburn.
I think he built this thing, saw what it had turned into, saw no easy way of fixing it (especially at his age and point of his career arc), and so decided to get out and leave it up to someone else. The two questions are:
a) are the people he left behind smart enough to recognize the problems he saw?
and
b) are they actually up to the task of fixing the OS's problems?
So far, Windows 7 seems like a step in the right direction, as is its quick turnaround time (suggesting these guys don't have their heads in the sand about Vista anymore), so I think there's some hope.
Bill Gates didn't get to where he is today by being ignorant and in the dark about Windows.
Bill Gates realizing and complaining about something that could work better in Windows isn't a huge "discovery". It is his job.
"But this one goes to 11!"
* All the editors (except vim)
* Amarok and Banshee are both better than WMP, iTunes, QuickTime, and the other common Windows media players
* The file browsers are mostly better than Windows Explorer
* Using butterflies beats Outlook (XKCD ref)